City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

“I’m not a pigeon—I’m a cuckoo.”

  “Bender hated pigeons.”

  “He hated cuckoos too.”

  “He was a cuckoo.”

  “Boo! Boo!”

  “As if anyone really controls this city, anyway?”

  “O fecund grand mother matron, Ambergris, bathed in the blood of versions under the gangrenous moon.” Merrimount’s melodramatic lilt was unmistakable, and Lake roused himself.

  “Did I hear right?” Lake rubbed his ears. “Is this poetry? Verse? But what is this gristle: bathed in the blood of versions? Surely, my merry mount, you mean virgins. We all were one once—or had one once.”

  A roar of approval from the gallery.

  But Merrimount countered: “No, no, my dear Lake, I meant versions—I protest. I meant versions: Bathed in the blood of the city’s many versions of itself.”

  “A nice recovery”—Sonter again—“but I still think you’re drunk.”

  At which point, Sonter and Merrimount fell out of the conversation, the two locked in an orbit of “version”/“virgin” that, in all likelihood, would continue until the sun and moon fell out of the sky. Lake felt a twinge of jealousy.

  Kinsky offered a smug smile, stood, stretched, and said, “I’m going to the opera. Anyone with me?”

  A chorus of boos, accompanied by a series of “Fuck off’s!”

  Kinsky, face ruddy, guffawed, threw down some coins for his bill, and stumbled off down the street which, despite the late hour, twitched and rustled with foot traffic.

  “Watch out for the Reds, the Greens, and the Blues,” Raffe shouted after him.

  “The Blues?” Lake said, turning to Raffe.

  “Yes. The Blues—you know. The sads.”

  “Funny. I think the Blues are more dangerous than the Greens and the Reds put together.”

  “Only the Browns are more deadly.”

  Lake laughed, stared after Kinsky. “He’s not serious, is he?”

  “No,” Raffe said. “After all, if there is to be a massacre, it will be at the opera. You’d think the theater owners, or even the actors, would have more sense and close down for a month.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave the city? Just the two of us—and maybe Merrimount?”

  Raffe snorted. “And maybe Merrimount? And where would we go? Morrow? The Court of the Kalif? Excuse me for saying so, but I’m broke.”

  Lake smirked. “Then why are you drinking so much.”

  “Seriously. Do you mean you’d pay for a trip?”

  “No—I’m just as poor as you.” Lake put down the drink. “But, I would pay for some advice.”

  “Eat healthy foods. Do your commissions on time. Don’t let Merrimount back into your life.”

  “No, no. Not that kind of advice. More specific.”

  “About what?”

  He leaned forward, said softly, “Have you ever received an anonymous commission?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “A letter appears in your post office box. It has no return address. Your address isn’t on it. It’s clearly from someone wealthy. It tells you to go to a certain place at a certain time. It mentions a masquerade.”

  Raffe frowned, the corners of her eyes narrowing. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never gotten a commission like that. You have?”

  “Yes. I think. I mean, I think it’s a commission.”

  “May I see the letter.”

  Lake looked at her, his best friend, and somehow he couldn’t share it with her.

  “I don’t have it with me.”

  “Liar!”

  As he started to protest, she took his hand and said, “No, no—it’s all right. I understand. I won’t take an advantage from you. But you want advice on whether you should go?”

  Lake nodded, too ashamed to look at her.

  “It might be your big break—a major collector who wants to remain anonymous until he’s cornered the market in Lake originals. Or . . . ”

  She paused and a great fear settled over Lake, a fear he knew could only overwhelm him so quickly because it had been there all along.

  “Or?”

  “It could be a . . . special assignation.”

  “A what?”

  “You don’t know what I mean?”

  He took a sip of his drink, set it down again, said, “I’ll admit it. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Naive, naive Martin,” she said, and leaned forward to ruffle his hair.

  Blushing, he drew back, said, “Just tell me, Raffe.”

  Raffe smiled. “Sometimes, Martin, a wealthy person will get a filthy little idea in a filthy little part of their mind—and that idea is to have personalized pornography done by an artist.”

  “Oh.”

  Quickly, she said, “But I’m probably wrong. Even if so, that kind of work pays very well. Maybe even enough to let you take time off from commissions to do your own work.”

  “So I should go?”

  “You only become successful by taking chances . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you, Martin, as a friend and fellow artist—”

  “What? What have you been meaning to tell me?”

  Lake was acutely aware that Sonter and Merrimount had fallen silent.

  She took his hand in hers. “Your work is small.”

  “Miniatures?” Lake said incredulously.

  “No. How do I say this? Small in ambition. Your art treads carefully. You need to take bigger steps. You need to paint a bigger world.”

  Lake looked up at the clouds, trying to disguise the hurt in his voice, the ache in his throat: “You’re saying I’m no good.”

  “I’m only saying you don’t think you’re any good. Why else do you waste such a talent on facile portraits, on a thousand lesser disciplines that require no discipline. You, Martin, could be the Voss Bender of artists.”

  “And look what happened to him—he’s dead.”

  “Martin!”

  Suddenly he felt very tired, very . . . small. His father’s voice rang in his head unpleasantly.

  “There’s something about the quality of the light in this city that I cannot capture in paint,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “The quality of light is deadly.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you angry with me?”

  He managed a thin smile. “Raffe, how could I be angry with you? I need time to think about what you’ve said. It’s not something I can just agree with. But in the meantime, I’ll take your advice—I’ll go.”

  Raffe’s face brightened. “Good! Now escort me home. I need my sleep.”

  “Merrimount will be jealous.”

  “No I won’t,” Merrimount said, with a look that was half scowl, half grin. “You just wish I’d be jealous.”

  Raffe squeezed his arm and said, “After all, no matter what the commission is, you can always say no.”

  However, once we have explored Lake’s own exploration of the post office as building and metaphor, how much closer are we to the truth? Not very close at all. If biography is too slim to help us and the post office itself too superficial, then we must turn to other sources—specifically Lake’s other paintings of note, for in the differences and similarities to “Invitation” we may uncover a kind of truth.

  We can first, and most generally, discuss Lake’s work in terms of architecture, in terms of his love for his adopted home. If “Invitation to a Beheading” marked Lake’s emergence into maturity, it also inaugurated his fascination with Ambergris. The city is often the sole subject of Lake’s art—and in almost every case the city encloses, crowds, or enmazes the people sharing the canvas. Further, the city has a palpable presence in Lake’s work. It almost intercedes in the lives of its citizens.

  Lake’s well-known “Albumuth Boulevard” trip-tyche consists of panels that ostensibly show, at dawn, noon and dusk, the scene from a fourth story window, looking down over a block of apartment buildings beyond which lie the d
omes of the Religious Quarter (shiny with the transcendent quality of light that Lake first perfected in “Invitation to a Beheading”). The painting is quite massive, the predominant colors yellow, red, and green. The one human constant to the three panels is a man standing on the boulevard below, surrounded by pedestrians. At first, the architecture appears identical, but on closer inspection, the streets, the buildings, clearly change or shift in each scene, in each panel further encroaching on the man. By dusk, the buildings have grown gargoyles where once perched pigeons. The people surrounding the man have become progressively more animal-like, their heads angular, their noses snouts, their teeth fangs. The expressions on the faces of these people become progressively sadder, more melancholy and tragic, while the man, impassive, with his back to us, has no face. The buildings themselves come to resemble sad faces, so that the overall effect of the final panel is overwhelming . . . and yet, oddly, we feel sad not for the people or the buildings, but for the one immutable element of the series—the faceless man who stands with his back to the viewer.

  This, then, is where Lake parts company with such symbolists as the great Darcimbaldo—Lake refuses to lose himself in his grotesque structures, or to abandon himself solely to an imagination under no causal restraints. All of his mature paintings possess a sense of overwhelming sorrow. This sorrow lifts his work above that of his contemporaries and provides the depth, the mystery, that so captivates the general public. —From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

  Lake slept fitfully that moonless night, but when he woke the moon blossomed obscenely bright and red beyond his bed. His sheets had become, in that crimson light, violet waves of rippled fabric slick with his sweat. He smelled blood. The walls stank of it. A man stood in front of the open balcony windows, almost eclipsed by the weight of the moon at his back. Lake could not see the man’s face. Lake sat up in bed.

  “Merrimount? Merrimount? You’ve returned to me after all.”

  The man stood at the side of the bed. Lake stood by the balcony window. The man lay in the bed. Lake walked to the balcony. The man and Lake stood a foot apart in the middle of the room, the moon crepuscular and blood-engorged behind Lake. The moon was breathing its scarlet breath upon his back. He could not see the man’s face. He was standing right in front of the man and could not see his face. The apartment, fixed in the perfect clarity of the bleeding light cried out to him in the sharpness of its detail, so that his eyes cut themselves upon such precision. Every bristle on his dried out brushes surrendered to him its slightest imperfection. Every canvas became porous with the numbling roughness of its gesso.

  “You’re not Merrimount,” he said to the man.

  The man’s eyes were closed.

  Lake stood facing the moon. The man stood facing Lake.

  The man opened his eyes and the ferruginous light of the moon shot through them and formed two rusty spots on Lake’s neck, as if the man’s eyes were just holes that pierced his skull from back to front.

  The moon blinked out. The light still streamed from the man’s eyes. The man smiled a half-moon smile and the light trickled out from between his teeth.

  The man held Lake’s left hand, palm up.

  The knife sliced into the middle of Lake’s palm. He felt the knife tear through the skin, and into the palmar fascia muscle, and beneath that, into the tendons, vessels, and nerves. The skin peeled back until his entire hand was flayed and open. He saw the knife sever the muscle from the lower margin of the annular ligament, then felt, almost heard, the lesser muscles snap back from the bones as they were cut—six for the middle finger, three for the ring finger—the knife now grinding up against the os magnum as the man guided it into the area near Lake’s wrist—slicing through extensor tendons, through the nerves, through the farthest outposts of the radial and ulnar arteries. He could see it all—the yellow of the thin fat layer, the white of bone obscured by the dull red of muscle, the gray of tendons, as surely as if his hand had been labeled and diagrammed for his own benefit. The blood came thick and heavy, draining from all of his extremities until he only had feeling in his chest. The pain was infinite, so infinite that he did not try to escape it, but tried only to escape the red gaze of the man who was butchering him while he just stood there and let him do it. The thought went through his head like a dirge, like an epitaph, I will never paint again.

  He could not get away. He could not get away.

  Lake’s hand began to mutter, to mumble . . .

  In response, the man sang to Lake’s hand, the words incomprehensible, strange, sad.

  Lake’s hand began to scream—a long, drawn out scream, ever higher in pitch, the wound become a mouth into which the man continued to plunge the knife.

  Lake woke up shrieking. He was drowning in sweat, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He tried to control his breathing—he sucked in great gulps of air—but found it was impossible. Panicked, he looked toward the window. There was no moon. No one stood there. He forced his gaze down to his left hand (he had done nothing, nothing, nothing while the man cut him apart) and found it whole.

  He was still shrieking.

  In “Invitation to a Beheading,” the sorrow takes the form of two figures: the insect catcher outside the building and the man highlighted in the upper window of the post office itself. (If it seems that I have kept these two figures a secret in order to make of them a revelation, it is because they are a revelation to the viewer—due to the mass of detail around them, they are generally the last seen, and then, in a tribute to their intensity, the only things seen.)

  The insect catcher, his light dimmed but for a single orange spark, hurries off down the front steps, one hand held up behind him, as if to ward off the man in the window. Is this figure literally Lake’s father, or does it represent some mythical insect catcher—the Insect Catcher? Or did Lake see his father as a mythic figure? From my conversations with Lake, the latter interpretation strikes me as most plausible.

  But to what can we attribute the single clear window in the building’s upper story, through which we see a man who stands in utter anguish, his head thrown back to the sky? In one hand, the man holds a letter, while the other is held palm up by a vaguely stork-like shadow that has driven a knife through it. The scene derives all of its energy from this view through the window: the greens radiate outward from the pulsing crimson spot that marks where the knife has penetrated flesh. Adding to the effect, Lake has so layered and built up his oils that a trick of perspective is created by which the figure simultaneously exists inside and outside the window.

  Although the building that houses this intricate scene lends itself to fantastical interpretation, and Lake might be thought to have recreated some historical event in phantasmagorical fashion, the figure with the pierced palm is clearly a man, not a child or mushroom dweller, and the letter held in the man’s right hand indicates an admission of the building’s use as a post office rather than as a morgue (unless, under duress, we are forced to acknowledge the weak black humor of “dead letter office”).

  Further examination of the man’s face reveals two disturbing elements: (1) it bears a striking resemblance to Lake’s own face, and (2) under close scrutiny with a magnifying glass, there is a second, almost translucent set of features transposed over the first. This “mask,” its existence disputed by some critics, mimics, like a mold made from life, the features of the first, except in two particulars: this man has teeth made of broken glass and he, unlike his counterpart, smiles with unnerving brutality. Is this the face of the faceless man from “Albumuth Boulevard?” Is this the face of Death?

  Regardless of Lake’s intent, all of these elements combine to create in the viewer—even the viewer who only subconsciously notes certain of the more hidden elements—a true sense of unease and dread, as well as the release of this dread through the anguished, voiceless cry of the man in the window. The man in
the window provides us with the only movement in the painting, for the insect catcher, hurrying away, is already in the past, and the bones of the post office are also in the past. Only the forlorn figure in the window is still alive, caught forever in the present. Further, although forsaken by the insect catcher and pierced by a shadow that may be a manifestation of his own fear, the light never forsakes or betrays him. Lake’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, “resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.” —From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of The Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

  Lake spent the next day trying to forget his nightmare. To rid himself of its cloying atmosphere, he left his apartment—but not before receiving a stern lecture from Dame Truff on how loud noises after midnight showed no consideration for other tenants, while behind her a few neighbors, who had not come to his aid but obviously had heard his screams, gave him curious stares.

  Then, punishment over, he made his way through the crowded streets to the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations, portfolio under one arm. The portfolio contained two new paintings, both of his father’s hands, as he remembered them, open wide like wings as a cornucopia of insects—velvet ants, cicadas, moths, butterflies, walking sticks, praying mantises— crawled over them. It was a study he had been working on for years. His father had beautifully ruined hands, bitten and stung countless times, but as polished, as smooth, as white marble.

  The gallery owner, Janice Shriek, greeted him at the door; she was a severe, hunched woman with calculating, cold blue eyes. This morning she had thrown on foppishly male trousers, and a jacket over a white shirt, the sleeves of which ended in cuffs that looked as if they had been made from doilies. Shriek rose up on tip-toe to plant a ceremonial kiss on his cheek while explaining that the short, portly gentleman currently casting his round shadow over the far end of the gallery had expressed interest in one of Lake’s pieces, how fortunate that he had stopped by, and that while she continued to enflame that interest—she actually said “enflamed,” much to Lake’s amazement; was he to be some artistic gigolo now?—Lake should set down his portfolio and, after a decent interval, walk over and introduce himself, that was a dear—and back she scamper-lurched to the potential customer, leaving Lake rather breathless on her behalf. No one could ever say Janice Shriek lacked energy.